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Jody Wilson-Raybould warned of Trudeau’s political interference in tense call with Michael Wernick

OTTAWA—In a tense phone conversation with Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick that Jody Wilson-Raybould secretly recorded, the former attorney general repeatedly warned him that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his officials were engaging in political interference with the SNC-Lavalin prosecution.

The 17-minute call on Dec. 19 begins cordially, but ends with Wernick warning Wilson-Raybould he was concerned about how the prime minister would react to her refusal to intervene in the trial and negotiate a remediation agreement with the Quebec company.

In the call, Wilson-Raybould issued what she called the “strongest warning” to Wernick about the actions of Trudeau and others.

“It is entirely inappropriate and it is political interference,” she said.

“Does he understand the gravity of what this potentially could mean?” Wilson-Raybould told the top civil servant.

“This is not about saving jobs. This is about interfering with one of our fundamental institutions. This is like breaching a constitutional principle of prosecutorial independence,” she said, according to a transcript released Friday by the Commons Justice committee.

It directly contradicts Trudeau’s and his top officials’ public assertions that Wilson-Raybould never advised him of any concerns until after she was moved out of her job as justice minister in January.

Wilson-Raybould previously testified she was under pressure by Trudeau and senior officials to direct that SNC-Lavalin be given a deferred prosecution agreement under a brand new law, which would allow the Quebec firm to avoid a criminal conviction and with it, a 10-year ban on bidding for federal contracts.

In new material released Friday, Wilson-Raybould contradicts Wernick’s public statement that the matter was not discussed at cabinet, reminding him she warned the entire cabinet when the change was being contemplated that any decision to use a deferred prosecution agreement would be exceptional, and would need to be left up to the prosecutor in trial cases, including SNC-Lavalin’s.

“I made it very clear at the cabinet table and other places that these tools are at the discretion of the prosecutor — and everybody agreed to that and there was no guarantee that there would be a DPA in this or any other case. So we are treading on dangerous ground here,” she said. “I cannot act in a partisan way and I cannot be politically motivated. All of this screams of that.”

But Wernick maintains through the call that Trudeau is not pressing Wilson-Raybould to do anything outside legal bounds. “His view is that (he) is not asking you to do anything inappropriate or interfere. He is asking you to use all the tools that you lawfully have at your disposal,” Wernick tells her at one point.

“The Prime Minister was not briefed by the Clerk on his conversation with Jody Wilson-Raybould, and we were unaware of the full contents of this recording before today,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement late Friday.

“As the Prime Minister said in his statement, he should have spoken directly with the former Justice Minister & Attorney General about this matter — and he wishes that she had come to him. As has been made clear through the various testimonies, and as the Prime Minister said, there was clearly an erosion of trust over the past few months between PMO, the Clerk of the Privy Council, and the former Justice Minister & Attorney General.”

The statement continues,

“All the facts are on the table now, and everyone involved has shared their perspective, including the Prime Minister. We are focused on moving forward as a team on the issues that matter to Canadians and governing in the best interests of the country.”

The transcript and audio of the call were part of a package that included texts and emails that revealed other new information about Wilson-Raybould’s decision on Feb. 11 to resign from cabinet, three weeks after she was shuffled into veterans affairs.

Wilson-Raybould denies testimony by Trudeau’s top aide Gerald Butts that she called minister of justice and attorney-general her “dream job.” She says he was the one who described it that way. Notified that she was being shuffled out of the justice portfolio, Wilson-Raybould says she told Trudeau and Butts “numerous times” she believed she was being moved “because of a decision I would not take in the SNC-Lavalin DPA matter, which they denied.”

She took Trudeau at his word but made a decision then that she would “immediately resign” if David Lametti, who replaced her as attorney general, decided to issue a directive in the SNC-Lavalin matter “as this would confirm my suspicions as to the reason for the shuffle of me in particular,” she said.

A spokesman for Lametti told the Star Friday that he has not issued a directive in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution since his appointment.

Wilson-Raybould said it was her meetings with Trudeau in Vancouver on the weekend after the story first broke that “led to my resignation from cabinet.”

She says Trudeau publicly held up her presence in cabinet as evidence of her confidence in his government and its handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair. “I resigned the next day and I trust my resignation also speaks for itself,” she wrote in her brief.

But she pointedly does not go into detail about any aspects of their private discussions over three face-to-face meetings the prime minister had with her on Feb. 10-11 that led to her quitting.

Wernick’s lawyer Frank Addario told the Star the taped conversation was a “covert ops” move, with her hanging onto it for a “convenient moment.” He dismissed Wilson-Raybould’s claims about Wernick, saying he was “asking for information that only she could give.”

“The clerk said this is a legitimate tool and why are we not exploring it here and he asked repeatedly for an explanation to pass on to the prime minister and she refused to give it,” Addario said. “She didn’t shut the call down. She described her wrong understanding of the law, which is that she can’t even call the (director of public prosecutions) to ask questions without putting it into the Canada Gazette. That’s not what the statute says, so he was right in thinking they were talking past each other.”

Wilson-Raybould acknowledged that taping the call with Wernick without informing him was an “extraordinary and otherwise inappropriate” move but says she wanted an “exact record” of the discussion because she suspected it was likely to be an “inappropriate conversation.”

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During the call — which Wilson-Raybould previously described as the culmination of the pressure campaign — Wernick tells Wilson-Raybould she is part of a team, and the prime minister still believes she can use “tools” at her disposal, including asking former Supreme Court of Canada chief justice Beverley McLachlin for advice.

“You are not just the attorney general, you are the minister of justice in a cabinet,” Wernick says to her. “I think the way (Trudeau) sees it and the advice he is getting is that you still have things you can do that are not interference and are still very much lawful.”

Wilson-Raybould replies, “It is not they are not lawful … the perception and what will happen is that it will be deemed political interference from day one when people were talking about why we are entering into a DPA or putting in a DPA regime in place … Everybody knows that it was because of SNC. Whether that is true or not, that is what people will think.”

The texts and emails that Wilson-Raybould gave to the justice committee confirmed much of the testimony she earlier offered about the SNC-Lavalin affair. Her letter stresses that she took to heart departmental legal advice that it would be unprecedented for an attorney general to direct the prosecution of a specific case absent new facts and evidence. Wilson-Raybould said none were offered in the SNC-Lavalin matter.

She flatly dismissed the prime minister’s explanation since the controversy broke that Wilson-Raybould “experienced” events leading to her resignation differently or that it was the result of an “erosion of trust.”

“The real issues engaged by this matter — the issues that will inform what type of Canada we want to live in and pass on to the next generations — are not, ultimately, about how things are ‘experienced,’ caucus dynamics, political ambitions, poll numbers, ‘erosion of trust’ or the role of social media,” she wrote in her 44-page brief.

By the end of the Dec. 19 phone call, Wernick is clearly concerned about having to go back to Trudeau without having made progress on the issue, telling Wilson-Raybould she was at “loggerheads” with the prime minister who is “pretty firm,” and that he’s worried about a “collision.”

It also speaks to Wilson-Raybould’s anxiety at the time about the possible consequences for not budging.

“I am waiting for … the other shoe to drop, so I am not under any illusion how the prime minister has and gets things that he wants. I am just struck doing the best job that I can,” Wilson-Raybould said.

Later, she texted her chief of staff: “Ok the shite is going to hit the fan.” “Uh oh,” replies Jessica Prince.

In her accompanying brief, Wilson-Raybould underscored that “prosecutorial independence” remains the core issue — “a principle that at times appears to have been obscured by layers of commentary, hyperbole and spin.

“Any attempts to normalize such efforts is very dangerous to the institutions of our democracy,” she said.

It wasn’t immediately clear what the committee will do with the new information. Liberal MPs on the committee had already voted to shut down further hearings into the controversy, including an opposition effort to have Wilson-Raybould testify for a second time.

Liberal MP Randy Boissonault said the package confirms what “we already know,” that no law was broken.

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre told the Star the recording “proves Jody Wilson-Raybould was telling the truth and Justin Trudeau was not. He claimed she never raised any concerns about political interference when she did so at least half a dozen times. He stated blatant falsehoods on that point and many others,” he said. The Conservatives have already asked the RCMP to investigate, as did five former Conservative and Progressive Conservative attorneys-general.

The RCMP has not yet opened a formal investigation, but says it is aware of the matter and monitoring events.

NDP MP Tracey Ramsay, who is a vice-chair of the justice committee, said the revelations in the audio recording underscore her party’s demand for a public inquiry in light of the Liberals’ refusal to allow committee hearings to proceed.

She said the audio of the telephone call presents “clear and compelling and well-documented evidence” of efforts to politically interfere in the criminal prosecution and her determination to rebuff it.

“There is no one who would listen to that call and believe she wasn’t pressured,” Ramsay told the Star.

“Trudeau has acknowledged that he asked Wilson-Raybould to “revisit” the SNC-Lavalin prosecution decision but has insisted that no ethical or legal lines were crossed.

“This is something that I was clear on, and then I asked her — even though I heard that she had made a decision, she indicated to me that she had made a decision — I asked her if she could revisit that decision, if she was open to considering to looking at it once again, and she said that she would,” Trudeau told a news conference earlier this month.

Wernick has acknowledged that Wilson-Raybould was approached about the file but maintains that there was no undue influence. In his own committee testimony, he said discussions with the former attorney general were legal and appropriate.

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